


crane our necks for sunlight

by Siria



Category: DCU, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: "Long time readers of my work will know that I think the debate over whether a woman can have it all is nonsense. No individual woman, no individual person, can have it all, whatever "all" is supposed to be. But one of the measures of maturing is knowing what it is you do want, and working to attain it. What would it take to turn a Supergirl into a Superwoman? What does she want to be when she grows up?"





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sheafrotherdon and Trinityofone for their feedback and help!

The view from the front porch of the Kent house changed with comforting regularity. Kara knew that if she sat there in February, she'd look out at an unbroken sheet of snow beneath a clear sky; if she came in spring, she'd be able to see the first shoots struggling their way out of the dark earth and towards the sun. Now in August, just like every August, the air was hot and humid and the fields stretched away to the horizon in swathes of ripening gold. The sound of the freshening breeze rustling through the corn put Kara in an almost meditative state, and so she startled a little when a glass of iced tea appeared in front of her.

"Thank you," Kara said, accepting the glass and shifting up so that Martha could sit next to her on the porch swing. Martha sipped from her own tea for a while with every sign of quiet pleasure, closing her eyes and letting Kara rock them gently as the sun sank towards the horizon. If Martha was wondering what had brought Kara home without warning on a Wednesday afternoon, she didn't say anything. Kara was grateful for that.

"You know you can stay for dinner if you want to," Martha said eventually, without opening her eyes. "There's more than enough to go around, and if you want I can whip up a pie for dessert."

Kara shook her head. "I'd love to, but I've got a midnight deadline for this feature I'm working on and I should head back. It's probably better if Perry sees me working late in the newsroom for once. After last week he's a bit, you know… twitchy. And when Perry gets twitchy, he gets loud."

Martha sat up and frowned. "Then at least let me fix you something to take back with you. You work too hard, sweetheart."

"It's fine," Kara said. " _I'm_ fine. I just needed to clear my head for a bit. Anyway, that sandwich place on the ground floor of the Planet's building opens late, I can get something l—"

"Oh no, absolutely not," Martha said, hauling herself out of the porch swing with grim determination—which was how Kara knew that she'd made a tactical mistake, and how she ended up flying back to Metropolis carrying a tote bag of Tupperware full of meatloaf, garlic whipped potatoes, and honey wheat rolls.

Even with a Kryptonian metabolism, there was no way that Kara could eat all of it—at least, not without having to swear off meatloaf for months afterwards—so she offered some around to the few harried souls who were still at their desks past nine. The beauty editor turned up her nose, snapping that she'd not let a carbohydrate pass her lips since 2009 and had no intention of changing now; one of the guys from the foreign desk took a bread roll with an absent-minded, "Thanks, Katie." The new guy—the intern for the features desk, Kara thought—took some, however, with thanks and a warm smile.

"This is great," he said as he slid one of the Tupperware containers into the break room microwave and turned it on. "I can't remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal—feel like I'm running just to stand still ever since I moved here."

"First jobs can be like that," Kara said sympathetically. "It's such a really big adjustment. My first job out of college, oh man, I had no idea what I was doing either, and I couldn't figure out the washer-dryer in my apartment complex and I was such a klutz, I…" She realised the intern's broad shoulders were shaking. "What?"

"Exactly how old do you think I am, Ms Kent?" He slanted her a look out of the corner of his eye.

"Definitely… not… twenty-three or so," Kara said, recalculating. "And so… probably not… the new intern?"

"Twenty-nine last birthday," he said, "and not the intern. I'm James Olsen, I'm the new photographer."

"Oh boy," Kara said, feeling her cheeks flush. "You're the guy who, um, you did that great series on schools in Baltimore and apparently my next assignment as a shoddy research reporter is going to be figuring out if I can drown myself in a bowl of mashed potato and gravy but you know, maybe you could just be even more understanding and chalk it up to me needing a new prescription and old age." She made a show of fiddling with her thick-lensed glasses and laughed in what she hoped was a calm and casual manner. "You know, thirty-six, getting up there. Ha ha."

"So you're saying if you could see me better, I definitely _wouldn't_ pass for younger than my age?" James asked.

"No! Well, I'm not—I mean, you definitely look good for any age, I was just trying to… oh god, that was a joke, wasn't it? It was. I should go, I should just—"

The microwave beeped, and James retrieved the steaming Tupperware container and set it down gingerly on a nearby table. He turned and rummaged in one of the drawers, producing two spoons, and offered one to Kara. "You should just stay and share these. Shame to waste any, and maybe we could team up. You know, a hard-hitting exposé on the dangerous trend in mashed potato drownings."

Kara didn't need any super-powered vision to tell her that seen up close, James' smile was pretty damn devastating. "I—okay," she said. "Sure, yes, I'd like that."

 

*****

One of the more uncomfortable parts of Kara's job was just how much time she spent looking at her own face. The tabloids rarely put to bed an edition that didn't mention Supergirl somewhere—everything from speculations about her cup size to banner headlines about how science had shown that exposure to Supergirl put children at more risk of developing autism than vaccines did. Cable news shows derided her for being the clear product of human experimentation by the military gone awry, or for perverting nice Christian teenagers with her bare thighs, but made sure to show pictures of her thighs whenever they needed the ratings boost.

The broadsheets like the _Daily Planet_ were slightly more circumspect. They ran celebratory banner headlines when Supergirl diverted a flood away from a small town, or thwarted a bank robbery, but so often there was a faint undercurrent of disapproval in the copy below. _Supergirl did not receive permission from local authorities before diverting the Chesterton river… Some people have raised health concerns… Of course, the means by which Supergirl gained the upper hand over the bank robbers must raise red flags for privacy rights activists…_

Supergirl did have staunch defenders, but that had only made Lois' op-ed all the more surprising—even, if Kara was honest with herself, a little hurtful. She'd come to think of Lois as something of an ally to both her and Supergirl over the years: two women against the world. It wasn't that Kara thought that she was above criticism—she wasn't, and she understood why people would get angry when Supergirl couldn't always come up with improbable solutions to impossible problems. But Kara hadn't expected to see Lois Lane's byline below something like _CAN A SUPERGIRL EVER GROW UP?_

Kara sat very still at her desk as she scrolled slowly through the piece. As ever, Lois' prose was brisk and to the point.

 

 

> "Fifteen years ago, we first saw the wonder of a flying girl: faster than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, the beginnings of a modern myth. Myths appeal because of their timeless nature, but should we be able to say the same of a person, no matter how fantastical?
> 
> Over the course of more than a decade, Supergirl hasn't changed one little bit, and as I watched the footage of today's feat of heroism I realised that I'm starting to find that unsettling, not comforting. Maybe the ever-youthful face is just the result of a really diligent skin-care routine, but Supergirl's still got those same sorority-girl curls she's always had, and as far as I can tell she only has one outfit. I'm not saying that any woman has to go chasing after the latest fashion fads, but staying frozen in time is just as unhealthy, especially if it's because you're trying to fit into other people's expectations for you.
> 
> Why do we still want a girl to save us? Anyone in their thirties or forties knows just how different a person they are, for better or worse, than the person they were in their twenties. Supergirl's starting to seem like a Disney princess to me: always on the verge of a sanitised adulthood, never quite achieving it, and used to sell merchandise just the same.
> 
> Long time readers of my work will know that I think the debate over whether a woman can have it all is nonsense. No individual woman, no individual person, can have it all, whatever "all" is supposed to be. But one of the measures of maturing is knowing what it is you do want, and working to attain it.
> 
> What would it take to turn a Supergirl into a Superwoman? What does she want to be when she grows up?
> 
> More importantly, are we—the ones who walk Metropolis' streets and tilt our faces to the sun to watch her fly by—willing to let her do it?"

 

That evening, Kara spent a long time looking at herself in the bathroom mirror after her shower. She'd scrubbed off her makeup and eight hours in the newsroom and the soot from putting out a small chimney fire on her way home. The face that looked steadily back at her was the same now as it had looked when she was in college. Kara had done her best to distract people from that with makeup, ugly glasses, and hair pulled back in a succession of severe twists and tight ponytails, with rounded shoulders and an averted gaze. It had helped that in the journalistic partnership of Lane and Kent, Lois was the one who took the spotlight and Kara the one who did the behind-the-scenes work. She didn't attract attention.

That had always been for the best, she told herself. Life as Kara Kent had been necessary, but that didn't mean she could let herself think of it as overly important. _Important_ had always been reserved for Supergirl, and what Supergirl did was crucial, necessary, too significant for Kara to abandon and let down the memory of her family.

"Ugh," she told her reflection, wrinkling her nose, "it's Wednesday night, who has a mid-life crisis on a Wednesday night?" Wednesday nights were for eating takeout pad thai on the couch while watching terrible B-movies about zombies or pirates. The TV scheduling gods smiled on her and gifted her a movie about zombie pirates in a war with merpeople, complete with a scene where an actor was clearly reading from the script he held in his hands, but even that hadn't made her feel better.

Go figure.

 

*****

"Look, Smallville," Lois said one Monday morning, "if you don't do something about it, I will."

"I—wh—you're going to yell at Twitter for me?" Kara looked up from her computer screen and resettled her glasses on her nose. She'd spent the last fifteen minutes trying to get a new banner image for her profile to upload properly and failing. "Because that seems like going ab—"

"Oh please," Lois said, with an impatient flick of the hand that wasn't holding a cup which was partly coffee but mostly whipped cream. "You know exactly what I'm talking about—you keep hitting the wrong button because you're being distracted by Mr Tall, Dark, and Handsome over there. Not that I don't get why you'd be distracted, because he's clearly a man who knows the value of a well-tailored pair of slacks."

"Shh!" Kara said, casting a nervous glance over in the direction of James' desk, because Lois had never learned the concept of an inside voice. "I'm not—"

"It's not like I've ever figured out the mating rituals of your people," Lois continued, "because Kansans clearly do things differently to the rest of us. But hell, I know from personal experience that even if you do dress like an Amish runaway, you're not saving yourself for marriage and you can do some things _pretty_ well." Lois took a sip of her coffee and arched an eyebrow significantly at her.

Kara felt her cheeks heat. "What happened to 'tequila is no one's friend and let's never discuss what just happened when we're on the clock'?"

"Eh," Lois said. "Anyway, I think you'd be cute together. And it would get you out of this rut you're in."

"I'm not in a rut—"

"Have you seen anyone since Ron the cheese guy?"

"His name wasn't…. Don't you have something else to do? You know, something you get paid for?" Kara tried her best to sound severe, but was keenly aware that she wasn't really succeeding.

"Conference call isn't scheduled til eleven," Lois said, licking at the mound of cream in her cup. "Which means that technically, I have enough time to go ask him out on your behalf."

"Oh god, no," Kara said, standing up so quickly that her chair almost toppled over. "Don't. I'll—look, I'll do it myself, okay? I'll ask him out." The last time Lois had set Kara up on a blind date, things had gone… well, Ron the cheese guy had been a step up.

"You are so easy," Lois said in disbelieving tones. "I will never, ever work out how you got the Tremain scoop. Also, he's right behind you."

"What?" Kara blurted out, whirling around only to find that there was no one standing there after all. She turned back and glared at Lois.

"I said you were easy," Lois said with an unrepentant shrug. "And also, if you think you avoided being obvious? I have news for you."

Kara groaned and slumped back down into her chair.

 

*****

Kara had left Krypton long before she'd ever had to think of courting or child-bearing, but she'd watched enough terrible holodramas as a child to know what would have been expected of a daughter of the House of El. An arranged marriage—most likely with an heir of the House of Ek or Ro, to better advance her own House's political interests in the north. It would have been eminently practical, and honourable, and Kara's duty to her family would have been set out plainly in the terms of the marriage contract. She could have chosen to work as a botanist or serve on the Council, to have a single heir or a dozen children or to adopt a distant cousin to inherit her line. No one would have thought to ask if Kara-El could have it all, even if she'd been a character in one of the terrible holodramas.

But Kara Kent had been a teenager in Kansas and an undergrad in New York and a thirtysomething in Metropolis. She knew things weren't the same here as they had been on Krypton. Sure, whenever she was back in Smallville, Jonathan and Martha tried to set her up with a nice local boy—Tim Jorgenson, say, who had a steady job managing one of the town's tractor dealerships and was unfailingly polite and utterly dull. Her parents never assumed they had either the right or the responsibility to arrange anything at all for her, though. Dating in a big American city was different again. Kara's one, brief attempt at using Tinder in Metropolis had taught her that most of the metro area's inhabitants didn't think overly much about familial honour when it came to their dating life.

Also, that human genitalia came in many different shapes and sizes.

On Krypton, Kara would have known she was an adult on the day she affixed her seal to the contract and stood to hear it read out under the marriage canopy. On Earth… well, she didn't think she necessarily felt any more like a grown-up when she asked James if he'd like to grab dinner some evening after work, but she did feel that little bit happier.

 

*****

They went to an art museum for their third date. James held her hand as they strolled through the galleries and talked: about the art, or what it made them think of. There was one portrait in the gallery of French Impressionists that always made Kara think of her mother—a cloud of dark hair and strongly set shoulders—but she couldn't really mention that. Instead she let James talk about the year he'd studied abroad in Paris and the hours he'd spent inside the Musée d'Orsay.

"My roommate couldn't really understand why I'd go there to look at the Van Goghs or Sisleys instead of the photography collection," James said. "But I liked the light and the colour. Or the way they could mix the two, really. I went through a phase when I was eighteen, nineteen, where I thought if I shot everything in greyscale, it would make me seem more grown-up, you know? More mature. But looking at those paintings, it made me wonder if I could see the same kind of light from behind a camera lens, capture it."

"So why news photography and not something more… artistic's probably the wrong word," Kara said. "You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do," James said. They paused in front of a huge canvas that showed an English country laneway stretching away under a sky filled with massing clouds; the slanting light reminded Kara of Kansas. "I guess there's something about the particular challenge of it that I like, the immediacy. You don't have a studio or a model or even leisure to frame things just right if you're a photographer out in the field, most of the time. Maybe you've got the space just between one breath and the next to get a picture that sums up a whole event in a single moment and you've got to just trust yourself and go. I like that kind of challenge."

"Huh," Kara said. "That sounds pretty sage."

James laughed. "Oh, I don't know about that. I don't think that's any different from how most news photographers would put it if they were asked. And you guys have to file copy in a rush sometimes, right?"

"Yeah, but we get to edit unless we're really down to the wire," Kara said. "It's not like it's just a… a moment that's there and gone when you're writing a piece. That must be pretty stressful, wondering if you messed up the big shot?"

James shrugged. "I already had that moment. I'm pretty sure there's nothing in my career that's going to top it for missed opportunities."

"Oh?" Kara asked as they walked through into the next gallery.

"You're talking to the guy who got the world's _fourth_ ever published photo of Supergirl," James said. "Doesn't really have the same ring to it as the first, does it? Pru Mendez got there before me, so she got the money and the Pulitzer, and I got an A in my course that semester and a reminder that if I'd just pushed myself a little more, gone out an hour earlier…"

"Oh," Kara said again. The very first photo of Supergirl had taken up most of the _Planet_ 's front page and been reproduced in newspapers and on websites around the world. Now you could buy it on fridge magnets and souvenir t-shirts: a picture of a crayon-bright streak framed against a dawn sky and the city skyline. Kara had no idea what the fourth ever picture of Supergirl looked like. "So is that why you came back to Metropolis? To, uh, to get a really good picture of Supergirl?"

"Nah, I came because I was offered a job with a steady pay cheque and health benefits," James said. Kara felt her shoulders relax a bit, but then James went on, "But I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to get a good photograph of her some day. That's on my photographer's bucket list."

"Is that why you've got those football pictures on your website—a bucket list thing? They didn't seem like the kind of thing you normally photograph." Kara had been trying to change the subject away from Supergirl, but the curious look James now sent her way hardly seemed better. "I mean, not that I've seen all your photos—obviously, I looked some of them up if I found your website, but that wasn't, you know. There's a line between hey, you're cute, and stalking and I think I'm still in the former, oh god, stop looking at me like that. I write stuff down, that's my job. I don't speak things at people, I'm not good at people."

James was smiling now. "I think you're just fine with people. And I've read a lot of your work, too. Not just because I think you're cute."

"Oh no," Kara said with feeling, "you're being charming."

"Don't know what you mean," James said. He had very distracting dimples.

That made Kara want to do ill-advised things, and she told James as much.

"Well, you have an industry-wide reputation for being sensible, Ms Kent, so I don't know when that would ever happen," but he was already wrapping his arms around her waist.

As far as reasons for being ejected from the Lillian F. Luthor Memorial Wing of the Metropolis Museum of Art went, Kara thought that being caught making out with James Olsen ranked pretty high on the list of good ones.

 

*****

Not long after that, Kara spent the night at James' apartment for the first time. Having sex had always been as unnerving for her as it had been pleasurable—would she do something wrong? Would she be found out? It was habit to insist that they keep the lights off and the covers pulled up, but James didn't balk. Kara found it was easy to relax into the warmth of his body, to shiver at the way his fingertips felt ghosting over the soft skin of her inner thigh. She had two very enthusiastic orgasms in quick succession, and her whole body thrilled at the way James looked at her the whole time. Even in the dim of the bedroom, his expression was warm and focused, as if he were really seeing her and not the slightly frumpy journalist who'd always been the less flamboyant, less famous half of the Lane and Kent byline: as if he were looking for colour and light. It was easy to stretch out on his bed, to wrap her hand around him, to listen to the way his breathing quickened and jumped when he came. Even trying to figure out which set of limbs should go where had little of the awkwardness that Kara had felt with previous partners.

Kara woke up to the warmth of the sun on her bare back, low music and the smell of breakfast cooking drifting in from the kitchen. It was a good meal—pancakes and fruit and fresh-pressed coffee—though Kara was distracted from paying close attention to it thanks to James' syrup-sweet kisses. So distracted, in fact, that she realised, at seven minutes before eight, that she was supposed to be at the Planet by eight to take over the election live blog from Seo-yun.

Super speed could only do so much, especially when she had to pull on her clothes and shoes and grab her bag at a rate that wouldn't make James suspicious. Kara had to fix her hair on the elevator ride up at 07:58, much to Lois' clear amusement.

"I feel like a proud mother duck finally watching its kid turn into a swan, or whatever," Lois said. "Look at you, coming into work in the same clothes you were wearing the day before."

"Says the woman who clearly never went to bed," Kara shot back. Lois was wearing a very large pair of opaque sunglasses, a sequined minidress, and heels so towering that she was almost the same height as Kara; she had a large coffee in one hand and a bottle of Tylenol in the other and her hair looked like someone had been running their hands through it.

"Never went to bed, got a lead on the Ramírez case, and hooked up with the hottest Greek librarian I have ever met," Lois said as the elevator doors opened. The curve of her mouth had a distinctly satisfied set to it; her lipstick was ever so slightly smudged.

"How many Greek librarians have you met?" Kara said with a frown as they headed for their desks.

"I think she could have bench-pressed me and I would have liked it. I'm going to write an ode to her thighs," Lois said dreamily. "Anyway, I fully expect to be thanked in your wedding speeches, just FYI. Well done on taking a chance, Smallville."

 

*****

The trouble with taking a chance was that Kara had to keep on taking new chances because of it, over and over. Every time Supergirl was called out because electrical faults had derailed a subway train during a morning commute, or when an Atlantic hurricane capsized a freighter and its crew needed rescuing, Kara had to take a chance that her absence wouldn't bring her once more to the brink of losing her job. When protestors needed protecting in half a dozen cities, she had to take a chance that James wouldn't be resentful or suspicious of yet another hurried, last minute excuse about why she had to skip seeing a movie or going for a hike. Kara had been dumped for being a flake more than once before. James was pretty understanding, all things considered—maybe because he also knew what it was like to face a deadline imposed by Perry White—but the longer Kara dated James, the more irritated she got with having to leave him, to lie to him.

One Saturday afternoon should have been spent with James at a Monarchs home game; instead, Kara had to fake some really horrific period cramps so that Supergirl could go fight a fire that was raging across a vast swathe of Canadian prairie.

"Not that I'm not glad to be able to help you guys out," she told a family of pocket gophers as she moved them to safer ground, "but he got seats two rows behind home plate. Two rows!"

Kara detoured to Kansas on the way back to Metropolis, and found her parents out in the yard bickering over what was wrong with the farm's elderly and increasingly unreliable tractor.

"If it's not the alternator, I'll eat my hat, Jonathan Francis Kent," Martha said, "oh, hello, sweetheart, it's lovely to see you! Give me a hug, no, I don't care that you're covered in soot. Come on in, there's pie and I think some of yesterday's casserole is still in the fridge."

Martha scrubbed engine grease from underneath her fingernails while Kara sat at the kitchen table and worked her way through a bowlful of tuna noodle casserole. "So," Martha called over her shoulder, "how are things going with you and your young man? I hear he's got a cute butt."

Kara sighed. "I should never, ever, have let you start texting with Lois."

"Oh honey, we Tweet at one another now," her mom said, pouring a cup of coffee from the thermos that stood on the countertop. "Lots more visual aids."

"I was going to tell you," Kara said as Martha sat down next to her, "but I wanted to wait until things felt a little more permanent. If they ever do. I really like him, Ma, but he… well, he's seven years younger than me, as far as he knows, and he might just get tired of me soon. Want someone closer to his own age. Not to mention, you know." She plucked at the hem of her cape.

Martha shrugged. "I trust your judgement, honey. You're a pretty good reader of people."

Kara swallowed a mouthful of noodles, propping her chin on one fist. "I want to tell him," she said, which wasn't at all what she'd intended to say. She squeezed her eyes shut. "About me. I want to… I don't want him to get tired of me, or to think that I don't like him just because Supergirl's needed five time zones away. And I know you and Jonathan have always wanted me to be careful and I don't want to risk you guys getting hurt, or him, but I don't want him to think I don't, don't value him just because I have to keep ducking out all the time."

"Hrm," Martha said, which could mean any one of a number of different things when it came to her. She shifted in her seat and fixed the fridge across from her with a thousand yard stare.

"Hrm what?" Kara said, poking at the last of the tuna with the tines of her fork.

"I think you already know what you want to do," Martha said. "You're just asking my permission to do it. Now, I'm always going to be here for you any time you want some advice, never question that, but I can't make your decisions for you. I think you know exactly why it would be a bad idea if I did."

"I'm not—" Kara began, but Martha held up a hand and cut her off.

"Besides, sweetheart, you just spent a long time talking about what this would mean for me or your dad or James, but nothing about you. I know that you feel like you were sent here to help, but sometimes you've got to put yourself first. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn't, but you shouldn't be afraid to take a chance."

"Ugh," Kara said, slumping forward so that her forehead was resting on the tabletop. "Seriously, I should never have introduced you to Lois."

 

*****

Kara's phone lit up several times a day with messages from James: most of them wordless, just images taken on his phone as he moved about the city. Sometimes they were measured and composed, other times a little grainy and askew, as if James had thought she'd like something and wanted to capture it right there and then before the moment was lost. It was embarrassing and probably a bit juvenile, how getting a message from him could make Kara's stomach flip, but there it was: she liked it when he thought about her. She liked getting to see his apartment balcony on a rainy morning, or the book he was reading in a coffee shop while he waited for a contact to show. She liked going along with him when he took his nieces to the zoo in Atlanta, and to the book store afterwards, and when they painted his nails a deep blue.

Each picture was, in a quiet, James-ish sort of way, an invitation to see the world the same way he did. Admittedly, that was the same invitation millions of people got every week, in the newspaper or online, but it was a little bit different when that invitation was in the form of a slightly blurry picture of a puppy balanced on James' knee.

 _I miss you_ , Kara replied, because she still had a whole five minutes left before her copy was due, and smiled helplessly at the response: James' left hand giving the thumbs up signal in front of a screen in an airport departure lounge that said _OA 597 to Metropolis: Now Boarding_. His nail varnish was a little chipped, but still there.

 

*****

James brought back plenty of artwork, courtesy of his nieces, that soon papered the front of his tiny fridge with every colour in the Crayola rainbow. "I think Mia's got an eye for composition," James said that evening. He was trying to get all of the pieces of craft paper to stay on the fridge with not quite enough magnets; bits of blue nail polish still clung to his cuticles. "Maybe we could get her a camera for her next birthday, what do you think?"

That distracted Kara from her valiant attempt at mastering the successful cooking of beef stroganoff. "Um," she said, stirring the pot to give her time to think.

"You think it's too indulgent?" James said, finally arranging everything to his liking and turning to fixing some spinach for the side salad. "I mean, I get it, I don't have a big family so I tend to spoil them, but there are beginner cameras marketed for kids. They're not that expensive and they're designed not to break easily. It's nice for a kid to have a hobby."

"That's not what…" Kara looked back at the pot, pushing her glasses back up her nose. "You really want kids, don't you?"

"I… I guess so. Yes. Not right now, but eventually." Out of the corner of her eye, Kara saw James lean against the countertop and fold his arms. "Is this—is it something you want to talk about? If you don't, that—"

Kara worried at her lower lip. "No, it's fine, this is just me over-thinking things again, I'm not… It's just that you were talking about her next birthday and that's a whole eight months away and if you're talking about _us_ getting her a camera for her next birthday I guess that means you think this is, is something that could last, like a long-term thing, and if you do want that maybe you don't want m—"

"Hey." James slid closer and nudged her hip with his. "Breathe."

Kara closed her eyes and for a moment she was back on Krypton, her mother settling her into the life-pod and telling her that no matter what, she had to protect Kal-El. That was her mission; that was her purpose; the one thing she had to get right—and yet here Kara was, and her baby cousin had died out there amid the cold stars and there was nothing she could have done to save him.

She breathed out and opened her eyes and looked up at James. "You should know that the chances of me ever having kids aren't good, even if I got, um, outside help." She wrapped her arms around her waist and tried not to feel bad about telling him a half-truth. After all, there wasn't a fertility clinic out there that would know what to do if a Kryptonian showed up wanting to have a baby with a human. "It's just, you know…" She waved a hand vaguely at her abdomen, letting James fill in whatever mental blank he wanted, age or an accident or an underlying condition.

"You don't owe me an explanation," James said.

"Yeah, but I want to tell you anyway," Kara said.

"That's okay, too," James said, and when he wrapped his arms around her and let her rest her head against his chest, that was a relief.

 

*****

A water main burst under Fifth Street late on a Friday afternoon, causing a sink-hole and a serious problem with the first part of rush hour traffic. By the time Supergirl got there, the street was already under a foot and rising of muddy water; businesses were flooded and people were trapped inside a parking structure on the next block. The water was freezing and fast, strong enough to buffet Kara around when she dived down to seal off the pipe and leaving her gasping when she climbed back out, dripping, onto the side of the street.

There were a couple of dozen people hanging out of upstairs windows, pointing and talking about her and filming clips to put on Instagram. Towards the end of the block, where the water wasn't as deep but still potentially strong enough to take your feet out from under you, was a small cluster of reporters. Kara recognised Maisie Liu from KCLA and her camera man, clearly reporting live, and Lonnie Sorenson from the _Planet_ 's metro desk, and James, snapping away furiously on his camera. Kara stood and looked at them for a long moment—for far longer than Supergirl would normally hang around once her job was done. She was seized by the sudden, irrational urge to wade down there, to ask James if he knew who she really was, if he'd gotten the picture he always wanted, if he saw light and colour when he looked at Supergirl or if he saw something more.

She took off before she faltered enough to do anything, her hands clenched into fists and her nails digging into her palms almost hard enough to draw blood.

 

*****

"Lois tells me you got _such_ a nice bouquet of flowers for Valentine's Day," Martha said. Although the video call was terrible quality, Kara could tell that her mother was trying her best to look arch and knowing. It was mortifying. "And that a certain someone now has his own space in your wardrobe."

"Could we maybe not have this conversation right now?" Kara said. "Or ever?" She'd been standing in the drug store aisle for the last five minutes, vacillating over what kind of dental floss to buy because she was pretty sure that once a guy started leaving a toothbrush and toiletries at your place, you had to take his dental floss preferences into account. Only Kara had no idea what conversational segue would let her bring that up in a natural way with James, and she sure as heck wasn't going to ask Martha.

"I'm just saying that you might want to think about bringing him home to meet us sometime soon. Jonathan and I are just dying to meet him. And Mrs Jansen already thinks you've been corrupted by the sexual wiles of the big city—"

"Oh my god, Martha," Kara said.

"—and frankly I'd like to see the old bat swallow her tongue when she finds out you've been living in sin."

"Okay, gosh, look at that," Kara said, "I have to go to work to do the thing, driving through a tunnel, bye," and ended the call while her mom snickered at her.

 

*****

The photo James had taken of Supergirl fixing the water main breach ended up on the front page of the _Planet_ and was picked up by all the major wire services. It was a tightly composed shot: the background was blurred and grey and only Supergirl was in sharp focus. She looked weary, wary, twisting to face the camera with one foot on a bit of shattered pavement and the other still in the water. Her hair hung limp around her face and her uniform so mud-spattered that it was almost colourless. Only her eyes stood out, fierce and bright and challenging.

The first time she saw the photo, Kara had had to will herself not to shake.

"Something to tick off on your bucket list?" she asked James when she saw him framing a print of it to hang on the wall of the newsroom.

"I don't know," James said, frowning down at the picture in his hands. He tapped the spot where Kara's family crest was barely visible through the mud. "I feel like I could do better."

 

*****

They drove down to Smallville for Easter. The rental car was too small for James' legs and Kara hadn't had to travel so far so slowly in a very long time. By the time they got over the state line, Kara was giving serious thought to telling James who she was there and then, and just picking up the car and flying them the rest of the way. From the way James stretched his legs when they stopped to get gas, Kara was pretty sure he would be just fine with the sudden, mid-Kansas revelation that his girlfriend was an alien.

She resisted the temptation, and they got to the farm just before lunchtime. There was food enough to feed a dozen people, and James' polite bafflement with her mom discussing malfunctioning tractor engines with him, and her dad talking about how Jeannie Stewart— _you remember her, Kara, graduated your year, red hair and a voice like a fog horn_ —had gone into labour with twins in the parking lot of First Methodist.

"Water broke in front of the pastor," Jonathan said. "I thought the old prude was going to drop dead right there and then and we'd have a two-for-one baptism and funeral."

"That would have been all kinds of inconvenient," Martha said. "Lord, what kind of pie would even be appropriate to bake for an occasion like that. More mashed potato, James?"

After lunch they piled into her dad's truck and went to watch the Easter egg roll behind Town Hall. Kara got to introduce James to a dozen people, half of whom she hadn't seen since high school; lie shamelessly to Meg Lindeman by promising that she'd be at next year's high school reunion, it sounded like so much fun; say "yes, yes it is," when Esther Postlethwaite asked her if that was _really_ the outfit she'd chosen to wear today; and watch with mortification as Martha waylaid Mrs Jansen. It took all the strength of character that Kara possessed not to listen in to that conversation—though of course they got the greatest hits version of it on the way back home anyway.

"Ugh," Kara said, settling in next to James on the porch swing. Her parents had gone upstairs for a nap and so it was just the two of them, under a blanket with coffee and the remnants of the apple pie. "I'm really sorry. I'd say they're usually better than that, but, you know. A reporter tries not to lie."

"I'm going to be really gracious about it all," James said, wrapping one big arm around her shoulders, "because you haven't met my folks yet and that's going to be on a whole different level."

"That's encouraging," Kara said.

"And I can't even promise you any pie in return," James said, and laughed when Kara elbowed him gently. They finished the pie and James set the tin on the ground before saying, "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure?" Kara said.

"If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine," James said, "and it's not really any of my business, but I guess I'm just curious. Your parents: sometimes you call them mom and dad and sometimes they're Martha and Jonathan. And no offence but they don't exactly seem like the West Coast hippy, my-kids-call-me-by-my-first-name types."

"Oh." Kara tried her best not to stiffen next to him; she couldn't believe she'd grown that complacent around him. Maybe it was that she'd never much had to be on her guard when she was at the farm. She'd been too visibly shell-shocked, too _off_ , to make many friends in middle school or high school, and she'd never had college or work friends come to visit.

"No, it's, um. It's fine, I probably should have told you this already, but Martha and Jonathan are my adoptive parents. My birth parents died in an accident when I was twelve and Jonathan's a distant cousin of my dad's, so." Kara shrugged, fiddling with the cuff of her oversized cardigan. This part of the story they'd always left a little hazy, trusting that people would be innately polite enough to fill in the blanks themselves and not ask too many awkward questions about adoption processes and just where, exactly, Kara fit into the Kent family tree. "They've been my parents in every way that counts but I guess part of me still feels a little bit, I don't know… guilty? Weird? Even after all this time. Like if I do call them mom and dad, am I abandoning my birth parents? So I guess I go back and forth, I'm not always really thinking about it but I—ugh, crap, sorry, that's—you didn't want to know all of that, that's—"

"Hey, hey, no," James said, tugging her closer so that she was snugged more securely into the long, warm curve of his body. "You don't have to explain yourself to me. I wasn't asking for a justification, I just wanted to know you a little better. That's all."

"I should have told you." Kara scrubbed at her cheeks; they were wet. "About the adoption, I mean. That's weird, right, we've been together almost a year and here's this huge thing you don't know about me? I'm sorry. I just… I just don't like to think about it very much."

"It's… I won't say it's not a surprise," James said slowly. "And I don't know of any kind of script about what's the perfect response to stuff like this. But I do know that I'm glad you feel like you can tell me now and that… well, sometimes the moment you tell someone about something, that's the moment it was meant to be told, right?" He sighed and rubbed his free hand over his head. "I'm probably not phrasing this the right way, but that's happened a couple times with some big things in my family. Sometimes you carry stuff longer than you should, or you think you need to make this rehearsed speech, but then it just… comes out when you least expect it. Like water finding its own level."

Kara risked a look over at him. "That's pretty philosophical for a guy who just ate half an apple pie."

"Guess that's what fresh air and clean country living does to a fella," James said. He was trying his best to sound solemn and serious, but there was a banked warmth in his voice, in his eyes, that Kara couldn't help but respond to—what Kryptonian could ever resist the pull of the sun?—and she kissed him, and climbed onto his lap, and kissed him some more, until they tumbled off the porch swing in a tangle of blankets and empty coffee mugs and pie crumbs.

"It's okay," James said from beneath her, sounding a bit winded. "I didn't need both those kidneys, it's fine."

Kara started to laugh, and then she was crying again, and then it was a messy, hiccuping mix of both, lying there on the porch of her second childhood home with James' arms around her while he stroked her hair. She still couldn't make herself say it just yet, but the thought that one day soon, James Olsen would know her biggest secret was maybe not as terrifying as it should have been.

 

*****

The evening was spent in front of the fire, playing boardgames while her dad marathoned one of his favourite glossy PBS dramas. A little after ten, her parents went upstairs. James was yawning by eleven, and Kara told him to go to bed, that she would have a shower and then join him soon. She waited downstairs until she heard James' breathing even out, then put on her suit and went flying. Smallville wasn't exactly a hotspot of activity at midnight in April, so Kara followed I-70 east. She stopped a gas station robbery just outside Junction City and a car chase in Overland Park before slingshotting back west, far and fast until she was breathing the crisp air of eastern Colorado. It felt good—helping people, the rush of the air against her skin—but not enough for Kara.

It was past one by the time she slipped into bed beside James, her hair still damp. In sleep his face was peaceful, relaxed; in twenty years, Kara could tell, he'd have laughter lines etched into the skin around his eyes. She wanted to get to see that happen. There was, Kara thought, every chance she was already in love with him, and he barely knew her at all.

They set off back to Metropolis at noon the next day, and Kara felt even antsier than she had the first time around. By the time they hit the city limits, James was shooting worried looks at her out of the corner of his eye, but Kara just kissed him on the cheek when he dropped her back at her apartment and waved goodbye with a forced smile.

"I just remembered a thing I had to do for Lois," she told him as she got her overnight bag from the back seat. "Super overdue, you know what Lois is like when someone misses a deadline—it's like kaboom, volcano, I'll call you later, okay? Okay!"

Inside her apartment, Kara had something approaching a panic attack before she put on the suit and flew across town through the late afternoon rain. The window of Lois' living room looked out onto nothing more glamorous than a narrow and trash-strewn alleyway, but it was wide open anyway. As Kara landed on the rickety fire escape, she could hear music, and Lois singing softly to herself under her breath as she typed furiously at her laptop.

Kara cleared her throat and said, "Ma'am, I don't think leaving your window open is safe in this neighbourhood."

Lois whirled around, clearly on the verge of delivering a blistering telling-off to whoever had interrupted her mid-flow, and then she saw Kara: Supergirl. Her jaw dropped. "Sweet baby Jesus asleep on the hay."

"I hear you've been looking for an interview with me, Ms Lane," Kara said.

 

*****

> "It's not every day that a reporter gets to talk with Supergirl. In fact, no reporter's ever landed an interview with Supergirl, not once in ten years, so you can imagine my surprise when I found her standing on my fire escape last night. After all this time, she wanted to talk, and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to say no to the Girl of Steel.
> 
> Here are the things she wouldn't tell me: her name, if she has one; the full extent of her powers; where she buys those boots of hers; who she'd endorse in the upcoming presidential election.
> 
> Here are the things she would: the name of her home planet is Krypton; she is the only Kryptonian on Earth; she both eats and sleeps; she's not a fan of syrup in coffee; she professes no underlying political agenda, apart from a desire to help people and see justice done.
> 
> (I also asked her what the view is like from the moon, and she smiled wryly and said, "Which one?" Let me tell you, that's one heck of a weird question to contemplate when you're sitting on your sofa in a ratty old pair of sweatpants.)
> 
> But my first and most pressing question was why Supergirl shown up and asked to talk with me, when she's made a virtue out of silence for years. Most people have long since concluded, with good reason, that she was content to be the blank space onto which other people could project their interpretations, their desires, their expectations. What had changed?
> 
> 'I read your op-ed, Ms. Lane,' Supergirl said. 'The one which asked if Supergirl could have it all, or ever grow up. I had some thoughts about it.'
> 
> I told her that generally, when I'd pissed off someone, they wrote a letter to the editor
> 
> 'Yes,' Supergirl said. 'I know. I read those too.'
> 
> Ever since Supergirl first appeared in our skies, people from every part of the political spectrum have voiced the fear that the will of one all-powerful person could substitute itself for democracy. America's flirted with fascism before, after all, and the blonde curls and ready smile are oh so beguiling. So far, those fears haven't been realised, but when you see Supergirl set her jaw, you realise that they're maybe not entirely unfounded.
> 
> 'Well,' I said, 'if you want to get one printed, I'm pretty sure I can guarantee the editor will run it.'
> 
> Supergirl's mouth twitched a little, but she said, 'I don't want to write, Ms Lane. I just wanted to offer you a response.'
> 
> It doesn't normally take someone almost a year to come up with a response to an op-ed, and I told her as much.
> 
> 'Would you believe you gave me a lot to think about?' Supergirl said, and there it was again, that flash of wry humour. She paused for a moment, looked down at her lap, and said, 'My whole planet is gone. That's why I'm here. Krypton was dying and nothing could be done to save it or most of its people. My family had the means to send out some of its children to a planet where they thought we might have a chance at survival. I was the only one to make it.'
> 
> 'So you're telling me that Supergirl is an intergalactic refugee?' I asked. 'Because I don't know if there's a provision in the DREAM Act for this sort of thing.'
> 
> 'I'm telling you why I've stayed. Why you even know my face,' Supergirl said.
> 
> My notes got a bit jumbled at this point, because Supergirl started dropping Kryptonian words into the conversation, and I'm not particularly good at coming up with a transliteration scheme on the fly for something that sounds like a tonal version of Russian spoken with a Brazilian accent. Here's what it boils down to: Kryptonian society was organised along tightly-knit clan lines. Supergirl was the oldest of her maternal line cousins which gave her a particular role within her rather powerful clan, like a combination heiress, big sister, and chaperone all in one. When she was sent here, it was with the expectation that she would be carrying on that role.
> 
> 'I was the only one who made it, but my parents had made me promise on my honour to look after the little ones, to defend them. I couldn't do that anymore, but I decided that I could do the next best thing. I swore my own oath.'
> 
> This was the point where I wished that I'd thought to add a little Irish to my tea, and asked her if she was telling me that the entire planet Earth had basically been adopted without its knowledge by an alien with an overblown sense of duty.
> 
> 'I am telling you that I have tried my best, but I haven't been able to have it all,' Supergirl said. She's got a pretty good poker face, it turns out. I couldn't tell if she was more sad or amused about that."

 

*****

Kara sat on James' fire escape with a copy of the morning edition and waited for him to wake up. She was aware that this was probably one of the creepier ways to go about this, but if she stayed away she might lose her nerve altogether, and if she waited in the hallway outside James' apartment, his nosy neighbour would surely see her and come to all the wrong conclusions about what was going on. When she heard James start to stir, she used her heat vision to reheat the two to-go cups of coffee she'd brought with her. Kara tapped gently on the window and waited for James to push up the sash.

"You know that my building has a door, right?" James asked as he stood back to let her in. He was wearing only a pair of boxers, and his cheek still bore the crease mark of his pillow. "Even an elevator that works nine times out of ten."

"I had to see you," Kara said, trying not to look him in the face. Maybe he'd figure it out before she could work out how to say it, and she'd really have made a mess of things. She handed him one of the coffees, saying, "Splash of creamer, no sugar, it's very hot so you should, uh, we should probably go sit down where we can talk. And you can put this on something horizontal and solid. Um."

"It is six thirty on a Monday morning," James said after a long moment, "and I'm still not really conscious yet, so I'm not even going to ask right now, I'm just going to go sit at my kitchen table and you can join me."

Kara straggled after him into the kitchen, sat, and fiddled with the cardboard sleeve of her coffee cup while James took a couple long drinks from his own. Eventually he blinked, looking a little more awake, and said, "This is the weirdest way that anyone's ever decided to break up with me, but at least you brought some really good coffee."

"What?" Kara blurted out, startling so hard she almost knocked over her drink. "No! That's not—I mean, you might be breaking up with _me_ but that's not what—why would you think—"

"Because two days ago you told me some personal stuff that maybe you regretted, yesterday you looked like you could hardly stand to be in the same car as me and then you ran off as soon as we got back to the city telling me something that I know for sure was not the truth. Now you show up at dawn on my fire escape with a look on your face like someone just ran over your pet puppy and I'm asking you what else am I supposed to think?"

"Not… not that," Kara said. She put the paper down in front of him, folded so Lois' cover story was front and centre. "You should read this."

James looked at the paper, up at Kara, back at the page, and started to read. When he was done, he sat back in his chair and said, "I'm still not exactly clear on why you wanted me to read this right now. Unless you're jealous that Lois got the scoop, which doesn't seem like—"

Kara shook her head and swallowed hard. "I… The coffee, I got it forty-five minutes ago at this coffee shop I like in Seattle. It gets cold when you fly back with it, but—please don't look at me like that. I'm telling you the truth."

James' eyebrows shot up. He looked down at the newspaper again and tapped at the headline. "This is a prank, right, or a—is this something you cooked up with Lois?"

Kara took her glasses off and set them on the table, let her hair down and pulled her shoulders out of their habitual curve. She met his gaze directly. "I wanted to tell you before but there never seemed to be the right time and I've told anyone before, no one knows except Martha and Jonathan, so I… I didn't know how. I was scared. But then I met you and so, well… hi, I guess."

"You're Supergirl," James said flatly. Kara couldn't work out if that was a good sign or a bad one. He was studying her face now, brow furrowed. "We've been dating how long and this whole time you've—I mean, I knew there was something you weren't telling me, but you're _Supergirl_?"

Kara nodded.

"So why are you telling me now? We've been together months and, what, you just decide to wait for a random Monday morning to tell me that you're an alien?"

"No, it wasn't anything _planned_ , I didn't even know I was going to do this until last night," Kara said. She'd been afraid of talking about this for so long—afraid that it would backfire on Martha and Jonathan somehow, that the people of Earth would finally and definitely reject her, that someone she loved would no longer want her—but now it just felt like a relief, even if James' face stayed worryingly blank. "Because you've been so kind to me, and so good, and I really li—" She lifted her chin. "I'm pretty sure I'm falling in love with you. And that's making me happy like I didn't know I could be, and I wanted you to know everything, but I've never told anyone before, ever. The only people who know are my parents."

"And now me."

"And now you," Kara confirmed.

James pushed the newspaper back across the table to her. "So this is the next step in you deciding how to have it all."

"No," Kara said firmly. "This is me deciding what I want to have. What I want is to be with you, and if I'm going to do that you deserve to know everything. You need to know everything. And this is it: this is the big, bad secret. I'm not human. I have a very weird part-time job. Sometimes, if I'm really stressed out, I levitate in my sleep. My name is really Kara, but it's Kara-El, not Kara Kent. When I was a child, my ship crash landed in Jonathan and Martha's back forty and they found me and adopted me and taught me their language and gave me their name and, um. Here I am." She stopped, worrying at her lower lip and feeling winded.

There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of a clock and the hum of a refrigerator, distant street noise and the muffled rise and fall of newsreaders' voices on James' neighbours' radio.

"I think maybe you should go," James said.

Kara flinched.

"It's not…" James looked tired, less rested than he had when he'd opened the window to her. He scrubbed a hand over his face. "I'm not breaking up with you. I'm not kicking you out. I'm just going to need some time alone to think about this."

"Okay," Kara said with a nod. The gesture felt stiff; her face felt hot. "I'll just, um…"

She clambered back out onto the fire escape and took off into the steadily brightening morning, leaving her coffee behind her.

 

*****

James meant what he said about needing time away from her. A day became two became almost a week, and Kara caught only occasional glimpses of him at the office—usually of his back as he vanished into an elevator on his way to an assignment. There were no morning phone calls, no late night texts. Kara understood, as much as it stung, and tried to bury herself in her work instead. Fact-checking an exposé on financial irregularities at the city's Department of Fleet and Facility Management would normally have been nit-picky and exacting enough to keep all her attention on task.

Now, though, she had Lois reaching over her desk to turn off her computer monitor and say, "Okay, Smallville, you've been wearing the same god-awful sweater for three days and if I have to hear you sigh one more time—"

"I haven't been _sighing_ —"

"There has been so much sighing, and it is distracting," Lois said. "Come on, I've got a bottle of rum at home, and three tubs of Ben and Jerry's in my freezer."

"It's two in the afternoon!" Kara pointed out.

"I also got my hands on a copy of _The Robot Werewolf From Beneath the Sea_."

Kara sighed. "Let me get my purse."

Later, when they were slouched on Lois' sofa and watching the very best terrible special effects that a movie from 1957 had to offer, Lois handed her the tub of Phish Food and said, "I'm sorry, Kara. I wouldn't have pushed you to ask him out if I'd known he was going to treat you like this."

Kara shook her head, digging her spoon into the ice cream and ferreting out some of the chunks of fudge. "It's honestly not like that. It's not his fault. We're just… taking a mutually agreed-on break for a bit, that's all."

"Ugh," Lois said, opening up the tub of Chunky Monkey, "if you use the phrase 'consciously uncoupling', I will have to end you."

"I am sad," Kara said around a mouthful of ice cream, "but I still have some standards."

 

*****

It wasn't the best week Kara had ever had, but it wasn't the worst, either. Maybe James had decided that it was too much for him—that the idea of dating an alien was too weird, that the fact she'd hid the truth from him for months wasn't something he could accept. But as far as protracted break ups went—at least in Kara's limited experience—it could have been a lot worse. James wasn't showing any signs of going to the press with proof of Supergirl's secret identity, and no shadowy government agencies had beat down her apartment door. It sucked, and it hurt, but at least she'd tried.

Kara flew home for dinner with her parents on Thursday, and ate two bowls of spaghetti, a bowl of salad, and a chunk of greasy garlic bread while dodging all of Martha's questions as skilfully as she could. It would be time enough to tell them after James had made a formal decision.

(Of course, this wasn't to say that Kara didn't spend time on her phone while Jonathan made coffee, googling for advice on _how to talk to boyfriend when he finds out you've been lying to him about being human_. It was just that she didn't really find anything except for an article full of relationship tips on the Cosmo website, and Kara wasn't enthused about the idea of putting a Scrunchie on anyone's erection.)

Her embezzlement article was published in Friday's edition of the _Planet_ , to exactly the kind of fanfare you'd expect from a complex story published at the end of the week in which Supergirl had given her first-ever interview—which was, essentially, none. It was deflating, but not exactly surprising. On Saturday, Supergirl flew to Gotham to help Batman out. He didn't seem to appreciate the assistance, even if she was the one who'd finally managed to get Poison Ivy down off the top of Wayne International Tower.

Kara flew home the next morning damp, disgruntled, and still sneezing a little from the sticky orange pollen that Ivy had been flinging around. She wanted nothing more than a hot bath, a trashy novel, and whatever leftovers she could scrounge out of her fridge to make a sandwich. Instead she got to her building to find that James was sitting on the roof.

"Um," she said articulately when she landed a few feet away from him. "Hi."

"Hi," James said. He didn't look like he'd been getting any more sleep this week than Kara had.

"Um," Kara said again. She was acutely aware that this was the first time he'd knowingly seen her in the uniform, and she felt weirdly embarrassed; she had to fight the urge to fold her arms over her chest, or pull her hair back into its usual low ponytail. "How did you get up here?"

"I slipped the building's super twenty bucks," James said.

"Oh," Kara blinked. "Well that's… not very reassuring, to be honest."

"No," James said. He took a deep breath. "Which was why I was thinking maybe you might want to leave here and move in with me, instead."

"Okay, see, nothing about this weekend is going how I expected," Kara said after a moment. "Because that sounds like you're _not_ breaking up with me."

James shook his head. "I'm not saying I won't have more questions, because this is still a lot for me to wrap my head around. But it didn't take me more than a few hours to realise I didn't want to let you go. If you'll let me, I want to wake up next to you every morning."

Kara stared at him. "It's been almost a week, James."

"I know. I guess I… well, I don't always act as well as I could when my pride's nettled. It stung a bit that you didn't trust me right from the beginning, even though I know that's not rational." He took a step closer, and the way he was looking at her made Kara feel a little stunned, made her breath hiccup: _wha-pow_. "Stung even more that I make my living seeing things and I couldn't even recognise all the ways you're amazing from the very first time I set eyes on you."

"Oh my god," Kara said faintly. "You can't just _say_ stuff like that. I mean, keep saying stuff like that, because I love you and I'm going to break my lease right now and—"

Maybe making out on a rooftop until her hair was a mess and James' mouth was swollen wasn't the most grown up thing to do. Kara couldn't find it in her to care.

 

*****

"What's a word that means the same as flaming misogynist asshole but that Perry will let me print?" Lois asked as Kara made her way to her desk on Monday morning. She was typing away furiously at her laptop, surrounded by empty Starbucks cups. "Jerk, scumbucket, craven, miscreant, ooh, how do you spell miscreant?"

"Should I ask?" Kara asked as she waited for her own computer to boot up.

"Did you even read the op-eds yesterday? Did you not see how that neo-Fascist troll doll at the _Post_ responded to the Supergirl interview? Didn't you—" Lois looked away from her screen for the first time and the expression of focused rage on her face faded away, replaced by a Cheshire Cat grin. "Oh, oh, you're glowing. You're glowing and you're wearing a dress that hits above the knee and you're late to get here. You got back with James!"

"We were never broken up, technically," Kara said. She pretended to be very interested in looking for a pen in her bag. It wasn't like she had a chance of fooling Lois, but it didn't do to encourage her.

"Semantics," Lois said, jabbing a finger in her direction, "because you are a woman who's recently had make-up sex."

Kara cleared her throat, because she was in fact a woman who had recently had a lot of make-up sex.

"Well, I'm glad," Lois said, turning her attention back to her writing, "because if I had to distract you from the mopes any more, I wouldn't have the time to keep defending Supergirl from rancid, prolapsed jackasses masquerading as reporters. I can't be all things to all people, you know!"

"Yeah," Kara said, opening her email and not bothering to hide her smile, "I'm starting to understand that one myself."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sunburst](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8448268) by [Siria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria)




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